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The New School Nurse Is Nurse Ratched
theodp writes "In Ken Kesey's 1962 novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Nurse Ratched maintained order in the mental institution by dispensing antipsychotic and anticonvulsant drugs to the patients. Fifty years later, the NY Times reports that some physicians are prescribing stimulants to struggling students in schools starved of extra money, not to treat ADHD, necessarily, but to boost their academic performance. 'We as a society have been unwilling to invest in very effective nonpharmaceutical interventions for these children and their families,' said Dr. Ramesh Raghavan, an expert in prescription drug use among low-income children. 'We are effectively forcing local community psychiatrists to use the only tool at their disposal, which is psychotropic medications.'"
False. Total Expenditures for 2008 = 596 billion for both primary and secondary education. Of that, 506 billion was directly being spent by the districts (vs adult education, debt obligations, etc for the remainder).
Plus, I wonder how much you know about schools that you would suggest firing administrators entirely.
I have mod points, but since you are well on your way to +5 insightful, I just want to add some data to this. I am interested in this topic, and I have noticed a series of articles in influential venues, like the Economist, the New York Times, etc. beginning a couple of years ago. They all have a common point: they are reporting some kind of controversial news, like here "doctors are prescribing drugs to poor kids to help them, is this good or bad", while the underlying message is unquestioned, that is, whether those drugs work at all. The underlying message is that they do and that would go without saying.
In the case of the Economist article, unfortunately for the drug companies and the PR firms probably doing this work for them, the reader comments were devastating for this underlying assumption. This article was asking whether it was fair that some students could have recourse to "brain enhancing drugs" bought illegally (like the one used in the treatment of ADHD). Dozens of people having taken drugs as students in the hope of helping at exam times reported their horror stories, and shredded every point of the article.
Big pharrna is financing PhD students in prestigious universities around the world, for work on the use of drugs, not for therapeutic purposes, but for enhancing the brain. This is something that I have myself confirmed meeting one of them.
Now it is the Slashdot crowd being targeted. According to the comments I am reading already, I would say this is another mistake of theirs...
The only intelligent thing about your reply is your decision to post it as Anonymous Coward. You have no specific knowledge that supports your worthless claims, have probably never traveled extensively in Asia, and are not well versed in Asiatic cultures or educational practices.
Asia, the content encompassing many diverse, non-Oriental cultural groups, has no unified or enhanced characteristics of diligence or excellence over the rest of the world.
My wife is Turkish, which is a country within the continent you mentioned, and many of her family have emigrated to the US after excellent secular graduate level educations in the Middle East to complete their post-grads. Her father was an entrepreneur, a taxi driver, extortionist, and kidnapper, and has been barred from re-entry to the US, but she's earned several degrees and has a great job doing something she loves. I'm Japanese, but was from a poor fishing village with few educational opportunities and a dialect that is unintelligible to the mainland. My family builds boats and houses and fishes to stay alive, and some were out to sea trying to earn a living when the tsunami hit. They value hard work, whether it is applied to sports or academics. This is the only defining characteristic of our mutual successes, not the continent on which our mothers' waters broke.
Your response was lazy, poorly informed, and stereotypical. Maybe you didn't learn not to speak in your 'American' (How ethnocentric. May I assume United States native?) school by your family when you didn't have anything to say. Maybe what separates your concept of what makes someone an Asian in your mind from Westerners is that they don't try to look smarter than they are and thus never risk looking stupid.
Remember, if you want to do better, ganbatte!
Have you ever done Peace Corps?
The reason why Asian-Americans excel is because wealthy Asians emigrate to America. If you actually go to Asia, you'll find that it's just like the U.S.: rich kids go to good schools and poor kids go to bad schools. The only difference is that cheating's a-ok beacuse it lets the school, the administrators, and the students all gain face.
By the same logic, every humanitarian foundation also has a vested interest in preserving human suffering and disease. Every mechanic, doctor, technician, developer, or whatever profession that is paid to fix things should be intentionally not fixing them to maximize profit, yes?
So why do any of these things work?
All it takes is working in education for even a brief time to understand that the majority of administrators should not be doing the job they are getting paid for.
It's not so much that they are bad at their job, it's that their job is counter-productive.
They dictate how classrooms should be run when they themselves have either never taught or haven't taught in 15 years. They are often completely out of touch with today's children.
As a result, we end up with classrooms that are dictated to be run a specific way that simply DOES NOT WORK. Teachers get reprimands for straying from administrative policy even though it provides a better education for the kids.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.